Why Young Opt Out Of Obamacare: Can’t Afford Health Care For Rich Grandparents

There is so much to hate about Obamacare that I overlooked something obvious: It steals from the poor and gives to the rich.

For years, going back to the nineties at least, people have been claiming that inducing young people to buy health insurance they don’t need would help lower the rates of everyone. Perhaps in the nineties the booming economy didn’t make this seem as evil as it is. Perhaps the plan has been around so long that many are too accustomed to the idea to think about what they are now doing to unemployed kids with large amounts of debt.

Looking at rates of homeownership, 83% of elderly households own a home. Meanwhile, 36% of millennials are still living under their parents’ roof. Those over 65 years of age have much lower poverty rates than most other demographic groups. Households headed by people 65 or older have 22 times the wealth of households headed by people under 35.

Not only are many young people either unemployed or underemployed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that people under 40 owe 67% of the roughly $1.4 trillion that Americans owe on school loans. That’s on top of an average of several thousand dollars of credit card debt.

ObamaCare forces people who can scarcely afford the extra cost to subsidize care for people who absolutely can afford to pay for their own health services.

In the exchanges, a young person will have to pay an estimated $250 per month for basic insurance. Again, this cost is so high because these premiums are expected to pay for older people’s healthcare costs. These costs now include covering a plethora of expensive drugs, services and procedures thanks to ObamaCare’s requirements for insurance plans.

In modern taxation jargon, Obamacare is a “regressive tax.” While I object to “progressive taxation” (where the rich are taxed a higher percentage of their income as punishment for being rich), I find “regressive” taxation even more repulsive. Stealing from the rich is immoral, but when the rich steal from the poor it is both immoral as theft and also as an act of serious destruction since the poor can’t afford to suffer the loss. It spreads over from “Thou shalt not steal” territory toward “Thou shalt not murder”—which applies to all sorts of harm that might not be as serious as outright killing.

Obama’s main legacy namesake is a policy of robbing the poor for the sake of the rich. Twenty-seven-year-olds with school debt, credit card debt, and no house, are being plundered so that other much wealthier people don’t have to pay the price of the medical care they want.